Re: Sonified Debugger vs. Screenreader Question

From: "Andreas Stefik" <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>

To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:52:12 -0800

John said:
> and natively spoken language is always going to be the most
> efficient means of communication.
Andreas said:
Not true, although the question really has nothing to do with the
questions I've asked in this thread, which were related to scripting.
Besides, we use a speech based interface in our tool.
Rouben and Terveen, for example, found in their 2007 empirical study
that sonification was actually more effective than speech based audio
for certain types of tasks (Navigation). Speech effectiveness is
highly variable and depends upon the context under which it is used,
the word choice, proficiency with the language, prosodic cues (Think
Robert Stevens work), not to mention cognitive issues in the brain
(Williams disease affects spatial cues, for example, which limit your
word choices for that group - Think baddeley's work), and of course,
whether speech is happening in parallel. Even listening to a news
broadcast while using speech cues, as they showed in an empirical
study in Madrid this summer, can lower the comprehension of speech
cues. Comprehension of speech is extremely complex, and whole books,
like Paul Whitney's 1998 book "pscyhology of language," have been
written on the topic.
Here's the Rouben reference:
Rouben, A., & Terveen, L. (2007). Speech and non-speech audio:
Navigational information and cognitive load. In Proceedings
of the 13th International Conference on Auditory Display.
and the madrid reference:
Tsujimura, S., & Yamada, Y. (2007). A study on the degree of
disturbance by meaningful and meaningless noise under the
brain task. In 19th International Congress on Acoustics.
The stevens reference:
Stevens, R. (1996). Principles for the Design of Auditory Interfaces
to Present Complex Information to Blind People. Ph.D.
thesis, The University of York.
Not sure why I deserved the negativity for asking straightforward questions.
Andreas
__________
View the list's information and change your settings at
http://www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind